I'm a little off today, and every little thing set me a little further off. The forces of entropy seemed arrayed against me. I walked around in a fog, and maybe my reactions to small frustrations were affected by it. I'm fighting myself, especially my own inability to cope.

To be more specific, I spent most of the afternoon searching every piece of paper in my files for information that should have been easy for me to find. The trouble is, I only need this information once a year.

There's no really good place to store something you only need once a year. If it's in a convenient spot, it's in the way the rest of the time (and probably gets moved or shuffled aside out of necessity). More likely, it gets buried beyond all hope of retrieval. Maybe you come across it once or twice when you don't need it, and you think you'll remember when the time comes. But you don't. I don't.

So I feel the way I would if I'd totally wasted the day looking for the driver's license numbers of all our employees, so that the insurance company can renew our policy for another year at a rate that could put us out of business. The Boss told me to ask Tim for the numbers, and Tim said, "Don't you have them in your files?"

Well, apparently not, based on the day I wasted looking. I have about half of the numbers, because I got copies of the licenses as part of their applications (to prove they're not illegal aliens). Since I've never met any of the current members of Tim's crew, I depend on him to give me the information I need. I won't write a paycheck unless I have their W-4, because it's required by the federal government. But I can't do much about the rest of it unless I get some cooperation.

Finally I just faxed him a note and asked him again. It's a simple list with blanks to fill in, so it shouldn't be too complicated. All he has to do is ask the guys what their license numbers are, write them down, and fax back the form. I don't think that's too much to ask, but I'll probably have to ask three or four more times before I get it.

I'm still a little off. I'm still in a fog. And I feel a little guilty for giving in to the frustration. I shouldn't have spent so much time on one project, especially after it became obvious that I wasn't getting anywhere. I shouldn't have put myself in a position to depend on someone else to come up with something I need. Of course, what I should really feel guilty about is not having a filing system that takes these kinds of things into account.